Instead, Monaco was trying to increase the value of its ICO; MCO, which apparently occurred on 19 June 2017. The idea was to use the claims about the Visa to raise Monaco’s price which apparently worked.

This sounds like “pump and dump;” a classic scam in which fraudsters issue fake claims to increase the value of a worthless stock they are selling. The difference is that pump and dump is being used to push ICO tokens rather than stocks here.